The present invention relates to utilizing computer vision applications for the automated searching of human image data for people as a function of visual appearance characteristics.
Video camera feeds and data there from may be searched to find targeted objects or individuals. For example, to search for a person, one may provide description information indicating certain personal facial visual traits to a manager of a video archive (for example, wearing glasses, baseball hat, etc.), wherein the archive may be manually scanned looking for one or more people with similar characteristics. Such a manual search is both time and human resource consuming. Moreover, human visual attention may be ineffective, particularly for large volumes of video data. Due to many factors, illustratively including an infrequency of activities of interest, a fundamental tedium associated with the task and poor reliability in object tracking in environments with visual clutter and other distractions, human analysis of video information may be both expensive and ineffective.
Automated video systems and methods are known wherein computers or other programmable devices directly analyze video data and attempt to recognize objects, people, events or activities of concern through computer vision applications. However, discernment of individual people or objects by prior art automated video surveillance systems and methods systems is often not reliable in a realistic, real-world environments and applications due to a variety of factors, for example, clutter, poor or variable lighting and object resolutions, distracting competing visual information, etc. Analysis of human activity within a video is generally limited to capturing and recognizing a set of certain predominant activities, each of which requires supervised learning and thus lots of labeled data.